


reconstructing a memory, unbelieving

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Amnesia, Canon-Typical Mould, Canon-Typical Violence, Insects, M/M, horror imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 12,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27093985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: Jon wakes up in a house he doesn't recognise.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 11
Kudos: 52
Collections: Fic In A Box





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quantumducky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumducky/gifts).



Jon’s cheek aches. Has done for long enough for it to have gone deep, right into the bone, spreading numb tendrils out through the rest of his face. That’s the first thing that he’s aware of, before he has the thought for words. Then there’s the cold – nothing biting, not dangerous, but enough to tell him that he didn’t sleep in his bed last night. 

That’s hardly unusual. He’s woken up so many times in the Institute, where the faint chill seems to be embedded into the stonework, that there’s nothing alarming in it.

It doesn’t occur to him that anything might be wrong until he opens his eyes. Before him, the blurring patterns of woodgrain fall away, crossed by hard dark lines where the joins are, until they reach a white-washed skirting board horizon. 

Even in the Archives, he doesn’t usually sleep on the floor. This isn’t right.

As far as he can tell, he’s fine, mostly. His head hurts, aside from the numbness in his cheek, a dull ache concentrated around his temples. Nothing that wouldn’t be chased away by a few more minutes of rest or a good cup of tea, but something else to count against what he imagines will be a thoroughly unpleasant morning - _if_ it’s even morning.

He sits up, slowly, risks craning around to look at the room properly when that doesn’t seem to break anything. It’s an unremarkable place - the walls are painted an unobtrusive shade of off-white, and the furnishings are similarly plain. There’s a desk holding an old PC, covered in dust, a post-it note with _Baxter2012_ written on it in red marker clinging to the monitor by one peeling corner, and a file-lined shelf opposite. A poster on the back of the door reads _Failure is the Chance to Do Better Next Time_ , accented with a grainy print of a sunset.

It’s an office, though it’s clear that there’s not been very much work going on in there lately. Jon doesn’t recognise it, but he’s sure he’d hate whoever owns it. 

He pushes himself to his feet, waits a second for his balance to settle, and then takes a couple of halting steps towards the computer. Moving the mouse does nothing except stir up the dust, leaving a clear track across the mat. A stab at the on button is just as fruitless, though the switch is on where it’s plugged into the wall. Just no power here, perhaps. 

The sole window in the room is high up in the wall, long and horizontal, and Jon can see nothing through it except a stripe of white sky. He considers pulling the desk chair over and climbing on it, but one of the wheels is missing and he dismisses the idea as too likely to cause bruises.

Crossing to the shelf, he considers the files - they’re basic, in a variety of colours and labelled along the spine, none of it indicating what he might be doing there, just _Tax Returns_ and _Business Outgoings_ and _Personal Expenditure._ All very diligent, he’s sure, but not exactly of interest to the Magnus Institute.

He pauses, examining the book end that holds it all in place - it’s as dusty as everything else, but he thinks that underneath it has the shape of a Scottish Terrier. It’s distractingly at odds with the plain utility of the rest of the room, and he’s wondering idly whether it might have been a gift, when he hears it. A faint sound of movement, out across the house, a creak like floorboards settling underfoot. He freezes, listening, but it fades away into quiet again, leaving him standing there, limbs taut and jaw clenched. Of _course_ there’s something else here, as if waking up alone somewhere he doesn’t recognise isn’t enough on its own.

Glancing around for something he could use to defend himself, he dismisses one thing after another. The desk chair is hardly wieldy, certainly not built for stealth, and the same goes for the PC monitor, though he is curious for a moment as to whether it would shatter like glass if he brought it down hard enough. There’s nothing better than the bookend, so he snatches it up, weighing it in his hands. It’s as solid as it looks, has a faint gleam to it like brass in need of polishing, and it seems to have a good heft to it - it’ll have to do. Would be no use against Prentiss’ worms, he thinks, a faint itch tracing over his skin, and probably just as useless against whatever else is out there, but it’s still a scant comfort to have something in his hands. Better than nothing, at least.

He grips it so tightly that his knuckles blanch, and moves towards the door, stepping as lightly as he can manage. There’s no sound from beyond, though he listens so hard that he can feel the strain of it through every part of him. He reaches for the handle slowly, as if it’s a wild beast that he doesn’t want to startle, and rests his fingers briefly against it before he turns it. It feels almost frozen, and he has to steady himself before he can recoil from it. He inches it down, raising the bookend in his other hand, and pulls the door in in an abrupt, swift motion.

There’s nothing on the other side but an unremarkable landing. Two sets of stairs, one leading up and the other down, both narrow and steep. There’s a painting on the wall that depicts a harbour at sunset, in such a way that Jon could swear he’s seen the likeness of a thousand times before. The floor has three other doors, two closed, and the last, at the far side, open.

Even as he stares out across the space, another creak sounds, as if something is moving in the room beyond. Jon inhales, holds it, and starts to move slowly out of the office. His own footfalls feel distressingly loud, though the boards stay silent for him, as if the house as decided to ally itself with him. There’s no indication that whatever is in there has heard, though – he reaches the opposite wall without seeing any movement, and flattens himself against it, waiting.

There’s another noise – this one different, more akin to a low sigh. It’s closer, he thinks, raising his makeshift weapon again. There’s a shadow across the floor, moving towards him, and he tells himself that that’s a good sign. It’s nothing unnervingly dark or sinister, just what he would expect from a figure blocking the light, and if it’s solid enough for that, surely it’s solid enough for him to hit.

He waits, and waits, muscles and mind bowstring-tight, and when there’s finally movement past the door frame, there’s nothing for him to do but bring the bookend down with a cry.


	2. Chapter 2

Jon sees far too late – he tries to change the direction of the blow, but the bookend already has its trajectory, and it’s too heavy for him to alter it. Should have looked, should have made sure, shouldn’t have been so damn _reckless_ , but he’s been afraid every second of every hour since Prentiss, can’t remember how not to react in kind.

Martin, at least, is skittish and fast. He starts at the sound of Jon’s voice, stumbling back and sideways, clipping his ear against the opposite side of the door frame as he tries to get back into the room. One of the bookend’s front paws scrapes down hard against his arm, leaving a deep furrow in the wool of his jumper, threads snapping and tearing in a way that Jon hopes doesn’t go down to the skin below. He yelps, bring his hands up as if to shove away his attacker, and then he recognises Jon, dropping them back down to his sides.

“Jon!” he hisses, eyes wide and wild. “What are you _doing_? That could have–” he breaks off, staring down the hallway, as if he’d heard something past it – maybe he had, but Jon can’t make anything else out past the low thunder of his heartbeat in his ears. He reaches out, guiding Jon inside, and then closes the door behind him, as softly as he can.

 _Could have killed him_ , Jon thinks, with a numb shock that settles into his head where the headache had been before. He has none of the illusions that he could’ve gained from watching too much 90s television, that there might have been a few minutes of unconsciousness but ultimately no lasting damage. If the blow had connected, he would’ve caved Martin’s skull in. Watched him fall, watched him slowly bleed onto the unfamiliar floorboards, watched him go cold.

“What are you _doing_ here?” Martin demands, in a rough whisper. He’s stalking in anxious circles around the space – it looks like some kind of front room, a sofa against one wall and a television opposite. Another bookcase, this one furnished like a holiday home, all crime and thrillers with the odd celebrity biography.

“I don’t _know_ ,” Jon snaps back, keeping just as quiet, though he’s sure if there’s anything in the house to hear, it already knows where they are. “What are _you_ doing here?” He wants to drop the bookend, let it splinter the floor below him, but his fingers are locked so tightly around it that he doesn’t know how to ask them to slide away from it. “I’m sorry, I–” 

“No, no, I – I’m sorry, just – just, could you look before you start waving that around, next time? Please?” Martin’s words are conciliatory, forgiving enough, but the urgency in it still lets Jon take it harsh, though not nearly as much as he deserves. “Do you know where we are?”

“No.” Jon points back in the direction of the office, welcomes the opportunity to stop trying to find recriminations in Martin’s expression. “I just woke up, in a room down there. I’ve never been here before, and I don’t know anything about this place except that it really needs a cleaner.”

“Same for me,” Martin says. “Except, I was in here. Sorry, that’s obvious–” 

“What do you think we’re doing here?” Jon interrupts him before he can ramble, digging around in his pockets for his phone. He’s half-expecting not to find it, but it comes into his hand easily enough, the screen flickering to life. There’s no signal, but he has over half his battery left.

In the periphery of his vision, he can see Martin watching him, his brow furrowed, and he shakes his head, trying to dispel the urge to growl at him to check his own.

“I think we might have been following up on a statement?” Martin hazards. “You – you don’t usually come for that, but it’s the only reason I ever go to new places, unless I’m out with Sasha and Tim, and we’ve not really got together much since…” He trails off, as if recognising that their lack of a social life since Prentiss’ attack isn’t relevant and is potentially a reminder of something neither of them wants to think about. “I just don’t think it could be anything else.”

“Then we’ll assume that for now,” Jon says. It’s not an unreasonable guess, but he doesn’t like it – Martin’s right that he doesn’t usually attend statement follow-ups. Even before he’d trusted Martin to do them properly, he’d usually just sent Tim or Sasha with him. It’s possible, he supposes, that it’s one of his own investigations into Gertrude’s murder, but he can’t remember bringing Martin on board with that, for all that he’s no longer quite so suspicious of him, the lies about his CV going a long way to dispelling the doubts that he’d had. “I think we should–” 

“What if Tim and Sasha are here too?” Martin asks, abruptly, running over the top of him. He doesn’t wait for a response, just steps back towards the door again, leaving Jon grabbing at his arm, trying to pull him back. “They could be in trouble, we need to find them–”

“Martin, _wait_.” Jon manages to haul him back about half an inch, gets his attention back. “We have no reason to believe they’re here.”

“Up until about a minute ago I had no reason to believe _you_ were here,” Martin points out, throws a gesture at the bookend. “And I’d rather find them myself before you can go all John Lewis Rambo on them–”

“Just wait a minute,” Jon insists, manages to slip around to press himself against the door, blocking Martin’s way. “We don’t even know where we are, so let’s just take stock of the situation before we run off. _If_ Tim and Sasha are here, that isn’t going to help them.”

Going off half-cocked, Jon reminds himself, with a twinge at the hypocrisy, had nearly got Martin killed. Tim and Sasha are resourceful, smart. If they’re in the house – which Jon doubts even more than he does attending it alone with Martin – they’re likely no more at risk than Jon and Martin are. And besides, it doesn’t seem like a large house. Based on what Jon’s seen so far, he imagines it’s some kind of cramped Victorian-style terrace, of the kind that often ends up rented out to students. If there’s anyone else there, they’ll find them sooner rather than later.

Once Martin no longer looks like he’s about to immediately rush from the room again, his stance relaxing and mouth falling away from the first syllable of Tim’s name, Jon risks stepping out of the way again. He backs around, keeping his gaze on Martin longer than he needs to, and shifts towards the large window at the other end of the room. It’s covered by a filmy net curtain, but it’s far more accessible than the one in the office, and he expects that it’ll provide at least some view of the outside world.

He gently pulls the curtain aside, and peers out. It’s daylight beyond, though it’s a hazy, muggy kind, the sky blooming grey and white and thick with rain. The row of terraces opposite is out of focus, the colours of the cars parked in the road muted and dulled. It’s an ordinary street, at least, no howling abyss or nightmare corridor maze.

Searching for a street name, he glances down towards the pavement. Outside, right in front of the house, directly in line with the window, a shadowed shape stares right back up at him.


	3. Chapter 3

He’s startled, for a second. Hadn’t expected to see anyone, let alone for someone to see him, and his mind is shot through with an abrupt certainty that he shouldn’t look them in the eye. It takes a moment longer for him to realise they don’t _have_ any eyes – no facial features at all. There’s no definition to the figure, or to the world close around them: no detail or colours in the clothes, no nothing. It doesn’t move, but isn’t so solidly fixed in place that he might be able to believe it can’t. It could, he’s sure, if it chose to. For the moment, it simply chooses to be still.

It’s still _looking_ at him. He knows that, even though it’s not possible. He can feel it.

“Martin,” he says, replacing the curtain and taking a slow step to the side, out of range of that uncomfortable sight. “Take a look out, tell me what you see.”

“Sure?” Martin casts a last glance at the door, as if he’s contemplating all the theoretical Tims and Sashas that he might find beyond it, and then he moves to join Jon. Jon watches as he pushes the curtain aside, scrutinising his face for his reaction – he needn’t have looked so closely. Martin flinches back, so hard that he loses his grip on the netting. “What is that?” 

“I don’t know,” Jon says, grimly. “But I think we should stay away from it.” He swallows, sets his back to the pane, with effort. He can still see the shape of the thing, on the backs of his eyelids. “Have you checked your phone? I haven’t got a signal, but you’re on a different network, aren’t you?”

Martin hums, the doubtful tone of it enough to set Jon’s teeth on edge, but he pulls it out anyway, flicking the lock screen across – _still_ hasn’t got anything more secure, despite what had happened with Prentiss.

“Nothing,” he reports, but he’s still scrolling through it, then turns it to show Jon his notes app. “There’s an address in here, though – maybe that’s where we are?”

Jon doesn’t recognise it, but that’s hardly unusual, in their situation. He hadn’t seen a sign out the window, but he’s not about to have another look.

“Maybe,” he says. “What do you remember?” He wants to take Martin’s arm, take him over to the sofa, but the rest of him shrieks at the idea of moving away from the window, from a place to stand sentinel, where he _could_ check on the thing’s location if he chose to. “From today.”

Martin hesitates – he’s still searching through his phone, only half his attention on the conversation, and Jon grits his teeth.

“Anything,” he prods, risks raising his voice a little more.

“The memories aren’t time-stamped–” Martin cuts himself off, shaking his head. “Sorry, sorry – I think I was late this morning. There were engineering works on the Victoria Line. I remember getting off the tube, and nothing after that.”

“That’s it?” Jon’s lip curls – he casts about for his own memories, fishing for the irritation he’s sure he would have felt at Martin’s lateness, but there’s nothing there. He’d recorded a statement the day before, though. Had wanted to get a quick start with research into the next one. “There was a statement,” he adds, pushing, hoping that that might remind Martin somehow, but there’s nothing in his expression except that particular desperate need to be helpful. “Regarding…” he hesitates, but the information falls obligingly into his head, just as it always does. “A series of manifestations at the house of Madeleine Carson.”

“Oh, right,” Martin says, nodding, still scrolling. “That must be here – I think Tim and Sasha were trying to follow up on Mrs Carson, and I was supposed to check out the house. I wasn’t expecting you to come with me.”

“I don’t remember deciding to.” Jon tries to put himself in his own position, from just a few hours ago, he hopes. It’s familiar enough – Sasha and Tim are better used back at the Archives, Sasha researching and Tim charming people over the phone, so Martin is often the one who ends up investigating significant locations. He imagines going to send Martin out, on his own, and something in his head tries to spit the idea out like it’s bitter to the taste. “I remember getting to the Archives–” Tim had pointedly absorbed himself in his book on architecture, refused to acknowledge his stilted greeting. Sasha had managed a vague nod, but he’d still felt no warmth from her. “–and that’s it.”

“I had a lot of missed calls from Tim,” Martin says. He holds his phone up again, frowning, so that Jon can see his call log.

Jon doesn’t even need to check his own. He knows he doesn’t have any, with the faint souring of guilt in his stomach. He shoves it away, insists to himself that it _still_ could have been Tim, that any one of them could be hiding something – even _Martin_ had been hiding something, benign as it had been. 

“It looks like he must have been trying to call me while we were on the tube,” Martin goes on. “I’ve dialled for voicemail, but…”

“You don’t remember it,” Jon concludes, far more scathing than he means to be. “And now there’s no signal.”

Martin gives a miserable nod, and has a brief scroll through what Jon assumes must be texts – with Tim, from the way that he tries to subtly tilt the screen away from Jon again. He doesn’t type anything, at least – Jon’s bones itch from wondering what they say to one another, whether they’re conspiring, somehow, no matter how hard he tries to swat it away.

“It probably means he’s not here, at least.” Jon injects some forced brightness into his tone. “If he’d come with us, there wouldn’t be any need for them to call.”

“Maybe.” Martin manages a brief smile, and then starts to worry his lower lip between his teeth. “Sasha? I don’t have anything from her. But she’s been having all these authentication errors with her phone lately anyway, I think she’s trying to requisition a new one, but it’s trying to wade through the bureaucracy, you know…”

“So probably just the two of us,” Jon concludes. “We should…” he hesitates, gestures towards the door. “See if we can find another way out.” He can tell without looking that the thing is still there, outside, waiting for them to leave the relative safety of the building’s shell, to come within range.

“That or we sit in here and wait for someone to notice we’re gone,” Martin says, and then he winces. It’s loud in Jon’s head, echoes with what he’d felt when he’d tried to imagine not going with Martin, and he tries to pull it out into the light, to study it, but it vanishes like mist the second he goes to grasp it. “Where do we start?”

“Downstairs?” Jon suggests. “People don’t _tend_ to have doors on the second floor.”

“Right,” Martin says, closes his eyes, briefly. “Sure.” He considers Jon’s bookend, and Jon can’t decide whether he’s hoping he might find one of his own, or is planning on asking Jon to leave it here. He keeps hold of it, and takes a purposeful step towards the door. Martin hurries after him, and together they move out towards the landing again.

Above them, there is another creak, as if something heavy is moving, somewhere over their heads.


	4. Chapter 4

The building goes still, after that. Jon tries to relax – it’s a good thing, surely, means that there’s nothing coming for them, not right this second – but he can’t. It just feels like the whole place is holding its breath, caught somewhere between fear and anticipation, and there’s no peace to be found there. 

The landing beyond is no different. Still narrow, still dingy, still the painting of the sunset harbour, tepid and unhelpful, though at least it hasn’t picked up any new figures. Jon steps out, and there’s no response, no further noise.

He glances around, a change of plans ready to reel off his tongue – there’s something up there, in the house with them, and the not-knowing of it has him by the throat – but the impulse dies at the expression on Martin’s face. His eyes are turned upwards, brows drawn and jaw slack, anxious as a dog on bonfire night. They’ve already both been caught by something here, have both lost memories, and Jon’s thoughts recoil from the idea that he might risk Martin any further. Better to get out, come back with the police or pest control or something, let them deal with it.

“Come on,” he orders Martin, and strides firmly out, past the next flight of stairs. They’re narrow, white-painted with a thin strip of carpet down the middle that looks as if its entire purpose in life is to trip people – there had been something similar in his grandmother’s house, always loose and dangerous.

Martin follows after another lingering, worried moment, his gaze flickering to Jon, and then down past him, as if he doesn’t want to be caught staring. 

The main stairs are as steep as they look; Jon has to step sideways more than once, trying to limit the risk of falling, but it at least keeps him moving quietly. There’s no more sound overhead, so he tries to convince himself that they’ve not been noticed, or are just not worth bothering with. Martin is close on his heels, his breathing harsh and shallow.

After what feels like hours of climbing, Jon comes within sight of the ground floor – ahead of him, he can see the front door, his perspective on it growing fuller with each downwards step. It’s plain white, inlaid with frosted glass panels, and he can see the silhouette of the shape from outside, standing directly against them. Waiting. There’s still no colour, and while he could blame the lack of definition on the pane, he knows that even if there were a peephole for him to look through, what’s on the other side would still be blank and utterly anonymous.

Jon moves down into the hall, and promptly sets his back to the door, to the sight of the letterbox, that he thinks might be lifting, just a fraction of an inch at a time. At the other end, he can see the way into a small kitchen, and there’s another room set off to the side, where he would have expected a lounge of some kind. Instead, it seems to be in use mostly as storage. He goes through, almost tripping over the wheel of a bicycle that’s been propped up against one wall. There’s another sofa, but it looks to be at the end of its life, foam spilling from split fabric – probably waiting to be taken to the dump, Jon assumes – and a table, with a pile of unopened letters on it.

There’s no back door in there. Just a window at the far end, obscured by a heavy, raspberry-coloured curtain, and still far too close to the shape outside. They should move on, check the kitchen, but instead Jon finds himself reaching for an envelope. They’re all regular in size, the kind that come through the door addressed to _The Occupier_ , but maybe they’ll be lucky enough to get an indication of whether Madeleine Carson is still in residence.

“Jon!” Martin’s hiss is punctuated by an abrupt snatching at his arm. “Jon, don’t move!”

Jon glances back at him, and finds him still staring at the ceiling. He follows it with his own eyes, craning his neck up. It’s higher in here, swirling ridges like storybook depictions of waves plastered onto it, and there is a _thing_ crouched on it. There’s a tail, or, at least, Jon thinks it’s a tail, has nothing else to call it, though it is kinked and crooked in far too many places to have any sort of coherent bone structure, slightly curled around the single hanging bulb that makes up the light fitting, and if it weren’t for that interaction, he would have been ready to assume it was an image held up in front of him.

He loses track of what the rest of it is supposed to be. There are claws, paws that seem to face backwards. A neck, leading into a long snout, slit by a mouth that seems to part in far too many directions. Inside, he can make out the broken-glass shapes of teeth, glistening with a faint iridescence. The dimensions of it aren’t right. It doesn’t belong – not just in the house, or in London, but _anywhere_.

The eyes are green, bright and lurid, and they are coloured outside of the lines.

It drops down off the ceiling like the drip from a tap, the motion too fast and too weird for him to focus on, and then it’s standing in front of them, gaze shifting like water under a breeze as it considers them. The mouth splits open a little wider, and Jon is sure that he should feel a billow of breath as it tastes the air, but there is nothing except a crumpling sensation through his mind, as if his thoughts are made from paper.

Jon’s head empties, panic burning through everything else that forms him. He stares at the thing, and knows with trapped-rabbit certainty that it means him harm, means Martin harm. There’s nothing else that will fit in his skull – no questions about whether he could move around it, whether he could fight it; he can scarcely even feel the weight of the bookend in his hand. It would probably pass through the thing like smoke.

The thing draws closer to him, jagged whiskers with the texture of autumn leaves brushing against his hand, and he stares and waits for it to do what it will, the fear lancing through his bones almost familiar. It shifts away, towards Martin, and Jon’s fingers tighten reflexively on his makeshift weapon.

Martin looks as if it has taken up the entirety of his world, too. As it circles around his legs like an affectionate, oversized cat, Jon can see a faint tremor across his shoulders. There’s nothing like purring from it – when he listens, he thinks he might hear a noise like scissors through pages, but it’s so faint that it might as well not be there. In its wake, the world seems to warp and settle unevenly, like oversaturated watercolour paints.

It pauses, snout abruptly jerking up, attention caught by something overhead. For a moment longer, it stands there, almost quivering, and then it whisks away, out into the hall, and starts to climb vertically up the side of the stairs with an impossible impersonation of limbs.

It goes, and goes, and Jon stares after it, waiting for his heart to stop beating loudly enough that he thinks it might hear, struggling with the understanding that he has met it before.


	5. Chapter 5

Jon never does take a look at the envelopes. Once he can stand the idea of moving again, he ushers Martin out and through into the kitchen, shooting glances around them the whole time as if the attack could come from any direction – he’s sure it could, that the second that any physicality of walls or boundaries became an inconvenience to the thing, it would simply ignore it. Martin closes the kitchen door anyway, as quietly as he can, moving a doorstop shaped like a fox over to stop it from swinging in, and the gesture makes Jon want to laugh, the potential of one simmering in his throat.

The room is fairly basic – oven, fridge freezer, stovetop, counters and cupboards, monochromatic colour scheme tempered by yet more dust. Jon ignores it all, veering hard towards the back door as if magnet-dragged. He reaches for the handle, and on the other side of the window, so does the figure. It stands there as if it’s about to knock, even as Jon flinches back. The lock slowly begins to turn, and he reaches out to grab at it, reflexively. There’s a moment of resistance against his hold, and then it subsides.

The shape is still there, though, outline running over the glass as a few spots of rain start to fall.

“We can’t go out this way,” Jon announces. Martin, apparently looking for more items to use to barricade the kitchen door, glances around at him, and winces. “It’s – it’s waiting.”

 _We can’t go out at all_ , he fills in, silently. He doesn’t imagine there’ll be any other exits, but even if there are, he knows that the figure will be there, too. That if he tried to send Martin out the other way, and stayed watching it, they would both find their paths blocked.

“Maybe – maybe we should risk it?” Martin suggests, though his hand has gone still against a blue plastic dustpan and brush for trying to keep track of the figure. “It’s not – it’s not really doing anything, is it? And in here we’ve got… what was that?” 

“I don’t _know_ , Martin!” Jon’s voice snaps too loud, and he grits his teeth, makes an effort to rein it back in, keep it quieter. “I have _no more_ information about this situation than you do.”

“Right.” Martin replaces the dustpan, far more exacting about it than Jon imagines that the resident here would have been, judging by the angle their toaster’s been left at. “Sorry, sorry.”

Jon busies himself searching through the kitchen, as if the swing of cupboard doors and drawers will be enough to take the sting out, to hide Martin’s silence. There are no answers to be found there. Just a plastic bag in the bread bin, an empty knife block that’s so dusty he can hardly see the slots, and a biscuit tin containing the crumpled remains of one digestive biscuit.

 _Risking it_ is not a good idea. Not while they know nothing about what they’re facing. Assuming that the figure has a physical presence, one of them would need to knock it out of the way in order for them to get past, and the idea of touching it makes Jon’s stomach turn. Their options are dwindling like a dandelion clock in a gale. Maybe, like Martin had said, someone will notice how long they’ve been gone, and come after them. After how persistent Tim had been in trying to get in contact with Martin, that might be sooner rather than later, especially considering, Jon notes, shoving a drawer closed with more force than necessary, how little Tim trusts him. Losing all trace of reason and hurting Martin probably wouldn’t feel like something too out of character for him to worry about, after the stalking and the arguments.

Maybe they just need to wait it out. Do their best to keep away from everything until help arrives. They could go back to the room on the first floor with the window, and bang on it if they see a passer-by, but it’s a foul day outside and besides, he’s not sure if the noise will draw out the thing again.

Still, he doesn’t like the thought of just finding somewhere to hole up, sitting around, waiting for the monsters to find them or not.

He opens one of the cupboards, and recoils. It’s filled with cans – soup and fruit and corned beef and whatever else that anyone has ever decided to put in a tin and shove to the back of the kitchen for the day the apocalypse comes - but every single one of them is split, bright and sickly colour spilling out from between the sheared-sharp metal edges. Mould, but not any kind that he’s seen before, and he doubts they have the good fortune for it to be mundane. He pushes the door closed again as quickly as he dares, afraid to disturb the air too much – he’s already feeling an itch in his lungs around the possibility of having breathed something in.

The next one along is cereals. There’s not much left but the vague shape of the box, though the new growths over it have at least retained the shape of the cartoon mascot, a painted off-brand lion staring out at him, pleading for a bottle of bleach.

Jon coughs, and firmly shuts that one too. Best not to risk another, he thinks – if he’s managed to avoid having anything take root so far, he doesn’t want to push it.

“Martin,” he says. “Don’t open the–”

“ _Christ_.” The word is punctuated by a heavy thump, and when Jon whirls, hefting the bookend, he sees Martin sitting in the centre of the kitchen, squinting owlishly up at him, his gaze flickering as if he’s trying to keep track of something that’s moving far too fast.

“–cupboards,” Jon finishes, faintly acidic.

“I…” Martin hesitates, shakes his head. He puts out a hand, and blinks in surprise when it finds the check-patterned linoleum underneath him. 

“Are you all right?” Jon’s chest tightens with abrupt concern, and he goes to crouch next to him, with a careful glance over the ceiling on his way down. “Martin?”

“No, no, I’m fine, I just…” Martin points, and then watches his arm as it wavers, clearly disoriented. “That’s just… there.”

The door that he’d opened is lower down than the ones Jon had, at the kind of level and size where he might have expected to find a washing machine behind it, tucked into the worktop to help it blend into his surroundings. There is no washing machine there, or, if there is, it’s been lost – in the space where it should be is a void. It stretches out, further than the extent of the building’s walls. Further than the ends of the street, than the city limits.

Jon studies it, for a second convinced that he can see something moving in there, far off in the impossible distance.

He, at least, does not have as far to fall as Martin did, and as he does, he takes the opportunity to close the door on it.

“No more cupboards,” he tells Martin, heavily.

Martin nods, and then tries to huddle in on himself, clearly waiting for the spinning in his head to stop. Jon feels it himself – Martin is a still, reliable point, for him, but the rest of his horizon twists and puckers as if he’s spent half the day testing out every rollercoaster in the country. He shuffles towards him, leaning his shoulder against Martin’s, and does his best to breathe.

Eventually, the kitchen steadies again, and the proximity starts to feel awkward. He’s uncomfortably warm, where they touch, a flush spreading out across his back, and he clears his throat, shifts away again.

“Did you find anything?” Martin asks, staring fixedly down at his shoes.

“Nothing helpful,” Jon says, wrenching his head around to look at his. They’re the same as ever, though he’s tied one of the laces on the left one a little too long. “Just more… not more of the same. More difference. Whatever’s happening here, we’re not prepared for it. We need to get someone else.” He wishes he could find just enough phone signal to call Basira. Maybe even Daisy. They would know what to do, here.

“Do you think the thing outside…” Martin pauses, searching for a way to articulate himself. “Do you think anyone else can see it? I just – there were a lot of cars out there. It must be quite a busy road. Could it hurt anyone else, or is it, I don’t know, for us?”

“I think it’s for us.” Jon has no basis for it, but he can taste the edges of Martin’s worries – if Tim or Basira or _anyone_ comes to rescue them, or if some local is unlucky enough to just happen upon the situation, how much danger would they be in? But it’s not as if that’s something they can do anything about, stuck as they are. They should be more concerned with staying alive themselves.

He tells himself it’s not really a lie.


	6. Chapter 6

The two of them sit on the kitchen floor for far too long. It’s not as if they have anywhere to be – for as long as the thing with the tail isn’t there, this is probably one of the better rooms to be in – but for as long as he’s there, Jon feels stuck. Stewing in what he tries to convince himself is misplaced guilt.

After all, on the scale of lies he’s told lately, that one hardly rates. He might be right – shadowy figures lurking outside buildings is generally the kind of thing that gets the police called, and the fact that that hasn’t happened could well indicate that they’re the only ones seeing it. Even if he’s not, why should there be anything bad in his taking advantage of Martin’s misplaced assumption that he’ll have answers? Especially if the point of it is to get him to worry about his own safety, rather than the hypothetical safety of others.

It’s not as if honesty has exactly been a habit between them, lately. And yet the untruth of it still squirms pointedly through his head, taking up too much space.

Eventually, he goes to stand – he’s still unsteady, tripping over his own feet and having to snatch at a counter for purchase. As he does so, his hand tangles in something fine and almost invisible – there’s a flurry of movement at the periphery of his vision, and he flings himself backwards so hard that his elbow cracks into the oven.

“Spider,” he says, with the cadence of a curse. It’s in full view now, scuttling out from behind the bread bin, as if it means to repair its web. Jon wipes his hand across the stovetop, hoping that he’s rid of any fine threads that might lead it out to him. “Damn. Spiders, what else–”

“I think it’s just a normal one.” Martin clambers slowly to his own feet, and steps towards the creature. It’s thick, bold, like it’s been drawn in marker pen, traces of brown and patterning along the body where it moves against the granite-effect surface. Martin lays a hand down for it, and it pauses at the edge of his palm, as if considering.

“Don’t touch it,” Jon growls, pressing himself backwards, half-expecting that he’ll accidentally turn the hob on. “There’s no such _thing_ as a normal spider.”

“They’re really important for the ecosystem,” Martin tells him, mildly. He sounds almost relaxed, for the first time since Jon had found him, as if he’s ready to sink into his premade lecture and let the rest of him rest. “In a place like this there must be lots for them to eat. I really think it’s just here for that. Nothing supernatural.”

Jon has a brief flash of the spiders in the tunnels, slowly starting consume the last of Prentiss’ worms, scuttling out from underfoot, and shudders. As he watches, the spider moves slowly up onto Martin’s hand, and he brings the other up to cup around it. He glances briefly towards the back door, and then away again with a wince, settles for just taking it to the opposite side of the room from Jon.

“There you go,” he says, softly, as he sets it down, watches it dart away behind the toaster. Jon bites his lip, hard, pushing down on a snapping demand that if Martin is going to risk himself by holding the damn thing, that he absolutely doesn’t tempt fate any further by actually _talking_ to it. That, as far as Jon is concerned, is just asking for trouble, for one of them to find a way to talk back, one day, and, well. Mr Spider Is Still Hungry.

“It’s too much,” Jon says, instead, and it comes out bleary but steady, at least.

“No, it’s okay,” Martin tells him, and then winces, as if he’s noticed the depth of incorrectness that statement contains. “I – I mean, it’s gone. The spider.”

“No, I’m not talking about–” Jon shakes his head, pushes away the desire to point out that it’s _not_ gone, it’s just somewhere else, that spiders are _never_ gone, always another one behind the skirting board or in the corners and the best that he can hope for is that they won’t want anything to do with him. “Not about _that_. It’s this house. There should just be _one_ thing, understand?”

“Not really.” Martin moves a little closer, frowning, as if trying to check him over. “Are you alright?”

“No.” Jon waves him off, impatient, his tone picking up speed and vehemence. “But it’s – listen. When we get a statement, it’s usually… one or two things. So there’ll be spiders, _or_ distance, _or_ shadowy figures.” 

“Oh.” Martin settles away from his fussing with a nod. “Yeah, I get you – but there have been ones that weren’t, right? Like that priest–”

“Father Burroughs.”

“–and the one with the coffin.” 

“Joshua Gillespie, yes,” Jon says. “Those are exceptions, though – there weren’t any insect swarms in Lost Johns’ Cave, Jane Prentiss didn’t have any weird meat stuff.”

“She _was_ a weird meat stuff,” Martin mutters, and then goes on more loudly. “So, it’s unusual – how does that help us?”

“I don’t _know_.” Jon glowers, the spark of action that had come from realising _something_ , talking it through, winking abruptly out. He scuffs at the linoleum, as if there might be something actionable hidden, just under the pattern. “At least most of it seems to be fairly low-level, at the moment. Seems like we should be all right in here as long as we don’t open anything. The main thing was that…”

“The thing,” Martin agrees, with a vague gesture that, when Jon thinks on it too hard, seems to match the angle of the thing’s spine, a memory that comes with a pulse along the line of the headache he’d had.

“Yes.” He doesn’t know where it belongs, what strange umbrella it might come under. When he tries to bring the picture of it to mind, it’s refuses to sit there, the shape of it incompatible with his thoughts. There’s an impression like a race-memory of being prey, the almost-glow of the eyes. “There must be some kind of _cause_.”

Not that that will be helpful. In half the statements he’s read, the cause is simply _monster_ , and the cause of _monster_ appears to be _unlucky_.

“Maybe the homeowner pissed a lot of people off?” It’s an anxious-edged joke, and neither of them laughs, but Martin seems to catch onto something in it. “Do you remember anything about whether or not the house is occupied? There’s a lot of dust, but surely if it had been abandoned someone would have come to clear it out…” 

“I think if there is someone living here, they’re probably dead.” It feels flat, but there’s no twinge of guilt at this one. “And, once we get out, we should get Basira involved – we don’t want anyone trying to clear it out without knowing what they’re dealing with. Professionals. Getting relatives in here would be like sending students into…” He trails off, a moment of connection in his head almost snuffed away by a faint creak of more movement from above.

“What?” Martin prods, apparently oblivious. Jon swallows, reminds himself that the thing hadn’t made any noises like that, and forces himself back to the conversation.

“Artefact Storage.”


	7. Chapter 7

There’s a moment of silence. Martin stares at him, and then opens his mouth, slowly, carefully judging his words.

“You think there might be artefacts?” he checks, testing, as if he thinks there might be another, far more obvious conclusion that he’s missing out on, and that he’ll be told off for not picking up on. “That the cause of this is… a whole bunch of artefacts?”

“It would make sense,” Jon says, gripping onto the idea, warming to it in the absence of anything else. “What we’ve been encountering – they doesn’t oppose, exactly, but they hardly seem to go together. They’re not particular to the house. It’s like they’ve been stuck together like… like a museum collection.” It feels convincing, to him. Perhaps he’s just so desperate to believe any kind of explanation that he’s ready to leap on the first one that presents itself.

“Okay, sure. What do we do?” There’s no needling in Martin’s voice, no further questions, no attempt to point out the flaws and supposition in his suggestion. Jon hesitates, more thrown off by that than he’d expected – it’s hardly an evidence-based argument, and even a year ago, Tim and Sasha would have wanted to discuss that. “If it’s artefacts? We don’t really have anything to… to make them stop? I don’t know, I never worked in Artefact Storage, and after what Sasha used to say about it I never wanted to go in there, you know? I think I missed the last refresher on safe object handling procedures–”

“There aren’t really any safe object handling procedures,” Jon tells him, speaking too loudly in an effort to cover the memory of _A Guest for Mr Spider_. It had wanted to be read, and he’s sure there’s no faraday cage or lead-lined box that would have been able to stop it, not properly. “If there are books, try not to read them, gloves to touch them is advised but if they want to get through your gloves they will.”

“Oh.” Martin starts to pull a face, and then seems to think better of it. “That – that makes me feel so much better.”

“Sorry.” Jon flashes a grim smile, all teeth and no feeling. “You believe me?”

“Well… yes?” Martin hesitates, abruptly doubting. “It’s not as if we have anything else,” he adds, but there’s a faint blush across the tops of his cheeks, and he glances away like it was a deflection. Jon’s expression starts to turn genuine, almost fond, and he shoves it away.

“Right.” Jon coughs, and tries to force his voice on a little stronger. “We should – we should try to find them.” Maybe, if they can, they’ll at least be able to understand better what they’re dealing with, perhaps enough to keep themselves alive until help gets there. “If you were storing dangerous artefacts in your home, where would you keep them?”

“I wouldn’t?” Martin sighs, frowns down at his hands as if they might have the answers written on the backs, like this is an exam they could cheat on. “But… basement? Maybe?”

“I’ve not seen a door to one.” The only unexplored place left on this floor is an under-stairs cupboard, and Jon dreads to think what kind of things would have taken up residence in there.

“Attic?” Martin hazards. There’s another thump from overhead, this one an impact, rather than a creak of floorboards, Jon thinks, and he winces. “Maybe not. Just… somewhere out of the way, where they’re less likely to hurt people.”

“They’re items of value,” Jon reminds him. “They wouldn’t be just out anywhere, not if the person know what they were dealing with, but you’d also want to know immediately if they were tampered with or taken. Where did you used to hide things?”

Martin flinches, and Jon quashes the abrupt desire to apologise, to draw attention to it. Maybe that question had pushed a little too close to home. He’d not said much about what his life had been like, when he was younger, but it sounds like it might have been difficult.

“My room?” he suggests, finally, the question inflection on it painful. “I don’t know. What did you used to have that you weren’t allowed?”

“Books,” Jon says, with a faint twitch of his lips. He hadn’t meant to share, tells himself he’s just doing it to try to make Martin feel better, cover whatever misstep he’d made, but it comes out easier than he’d anticipated. “I got the sense that some of them were a little… beyond my reading age. I don’t think there was too much point in me trying to hide them, I’m sure my grandmother wouldn’t have worried. She probably bought me worse herself. Sometimes, I just got the sense that I wasn’t supposed to have them. I kept them in my room, at the bottoms of drawers.”

“That’s probably up there, isn’t it?” Martin gives a despairing point upwards, braces like he’s waiting for a noise to punctuate it, but none comes.

“Probably.” Jon straightens his back, finds himself offering Martin his hand and awkwardly averting it, into a gesture towards the door. “Shall we?”

Martin grimaces, but he steps past Jon anyway, stooping to shift the fox doorstop. He weighs it for a moment, like he’s considering it as a weapon comparable to Jon’s bookend, but then seems to decide against it. They go slowly back out into the hallway together, and Jon lets out a breath when there’s no sign of the thing, even when he checks every plane of the space. Martin leads the way up the stairs, and despite Jon’s best efforts, he can’t step past him until they reach the first landing.

Martin gives him an accusatory glance as he does so, and Jon brandishes the bookend in silent answer, trying to point out that it just makes more sense for him to be in the front. He’s not sure if he manages it, but Martin at least relents, gesturing for Jon to go ahead with a too-tight shrug. 

There’s only one door on the first floor that they’ve not opened yet – Jon pulls it ajar to a squirming of earwigs, and pushes it shut again. Storage, from the brief impression that he’d got, something like a vacuum cleaner and an ironing board.

The stairs the rest of the way up creak, clearly well-used. Every tread has that quality to it, the one the thing had left in its wake, the resolution a little muddied, but Jon’s feet land on them stably enough. They lead up to a wall, this one with a painting of a woman standing in a field of poppies, with two doors on either side, both of them open. Jon looks fixedly to his left, and follows in that direction the second that he sees a bed, without risking a glance in the other direction. He steps aside to let Martin in, and pushes the door as close to shut as he dares behind them, as quietly as he can.

“Right,” he whispers, pointing Martin towards the far side of the room, intending to start checking the other himself. “Let’s see what we can find.”


	8. Chapter 8

The search seems so loud. The room is comparatively bare – bed, drawers, shelves, all as plain as possible and as low on clutter as the rest of the house – but everything seems to have been fashioned from the noisiest materials possible. When Jon pulls out the drawers, it’s with a shriek of sliding wood, a thud each time he tries to bring them to rest. It all seems to echo through the house, screaming out that they’re there. His skin prickles like a thousand eyes have turned towards them, as if every single earwig in that cupboard knows and understands their presence, and is starting to come swarming towards them with malicious intent.

Opposite, the floor creaks under Martin as he crouches to check under the bed, loud enough that he’s sure the neighbours could hear. Jon curses it silently, and starts to yank books of the shelf, checking behind them. Wonders, briefly, whether he should be checking inside, too, but the impulse is cut across by another cry of wood.

“Here,” Martin says, quietly, in the wake of it.

Jon shoves his book back, hardly noticing that it’s upside down, and turns. Martin has pushed the bed a little way to the side, and is examining some of the boards – the shadows in their edges seem a little deeper than those of their fellows, and as Jon watches, Martin presses down on the far end, then scrabbles his fingers along the rising lip, lifting it to reveal a dark space below.

Shooting a glance at the door – unmoving for the moment – Jon goes to crouch beside him, peering down into the space. Martin’s already reaching into it, and Jon shoves his hand back instinctively. He sets the bookend carefully down, and then pulls out his phone, shining the torch down into the hole.

There are a few items in there, tucked into a large open shoebox. Each of them is wrapped in a thin layer of paper, which Jon supposes is about as much protection as they can expect. He gently picks the first thing out, and places it on the floor between them, easing the paper gently away to reveal a piece of honeycombed and pitted stone that he thinks might be coral.

“Look.” Martin eases the paper out from under it – it’s clearly not proper packing paper, more just a sheet that’s been crumpled into place around the item. There are a few rows of carefully printed information, and then a few signatures, looping around the bottom of the sheet. “Salesa. Do you think he lived here?”

“I doubt it,” Jon says. “Salesa didn’t strike me as careless. He sells things on, doesn’t keep them for himself. Maybe this is someone who worked for him – these items are all fairly small, might have been easy to steal. That could be what Tim was trying to tell you. Perhaps he and Sasha were looking into the history of the house and found the connection.” 

Martin hums – Jon ignores him, in favour of reading over the rest of what’s on the sheet. There’s a short description of the item – a paperweight, apparently, though he’s sure that anything with enough weight could meet that purpose. It turns food in its proximity bad, which at least explains the state of the kitchen cupboards.

The next item is a mirror – Martin’s pulling the paper out almost before Jon can lay the thing down, and it comes dangerously close to tipping over and smashing. He steadies it with one sleeve, opens his mouth to snap at Martin, something along the lines of not wanting to find out how many years of bad luck they’d get for breaking a supernatural mirrors, but Martin’s already speaking.

“It says it causes the appearance of nearby figures,” he says. “And they’re not dangerous for the first few days.”

The sound of it eases something in Jon’s chest, and he lets his crouch falter into a sit.

“Sounds like we should be able to leave without too much trouble,” he says. “Unless we’ve been here longer than we thought.”

“Your phone says it’s still the eighteenth,” Martin tells him, but from the tone of his voice, he’s not willing to trust too much in that.

“We should try,” Jon says, trying to push more confidence into it than he feels. “If there’s a signal outside we can call the Institute, get a team here from Artefact Storage. Everything here needs to be removed – we shouldn’t interact with it any more than we have to.” Even as he says it, he’s already got one hand in the box again, tugging something loose from the bottom. Knows what it is, even before he’s brought it all the way out into the light.

It’s a book – thin, flimsy, and oddly square. His eyes refuse to focus on the title, but when he flips it open, he recognises the label well enough, the hated strokes of Leitner’s name. The next page is mostly illustration, a room in a house, but the focal point of the drawing is missing.

 _It_ , claims the text, _is a thief. It lives above doorways, and makes sure you can never remember why you went through them_.

“You said not to read anything,” Martin hisses, shoving at his shoulder so violently that it’s clear it’s a poor substitute for actually slapping the book out of his grip.

Jon folds it closed, and puts it down on top of the mirror.

“I think we know where our friend came from,” he says, hollowly. “It’s why we don’t remember.” The thought of it prickles the skin at the back of his neck, makes his teeth ache – he half wants to keep leafing through the book, in case there’s any indication of what it might look like when it eats, how it happens. Scrape together what little he can to go where his memories have been swallowed, even if it’s just that, and not what reason he might possibly have had for refusing to send Martin out on his own.

Martin would stop him, though. And he’d be right to. There might be other things in the book, for all he knows, a whole compendium of monsters, ready to crawl out of the ink and start hunting.

“Oh.” Martin casts a narrow-eyed glance at the book, and then visibly dismisses it. “Time to go, then?”

“Time to go,” Jon agrees. He climbs back to his feet, offers Martin a hand up and a smile, one that it feels like he means. Martin takes it, even though he clearly doesn’t need to, doesn’t pull much on Jon’s grip, his touch warm and gentle. The peace of the idea that they can just leave seems to well out through him, and he leads the way to the door, pulls it wide again without thinking.

Then, he sees. There’s no way of avoiding it, except to try and go down the stairs with his eyes closed. The thing is there, in the other room, directly across from them. An untidy illustration, all jagged and wavering lines, tortured, aching angles struggling to keep their form in a world not made of ink and pen. It circles languidly around the shape of the man on the floor. He’s soundless, but from the shake of his shoulders and the wretched curl of his body, Jon can tell that he’s weeping, and has been for hours.


	9. Chapter 9

It sees them. Its head snaps towards them the second that Jon notices it, its gaze searing at him like a brand. It’s assessing, he realises, gauging whether or not there is anything in his head worth eating, worth leaving its current prey for.

He stumbles back and around, crashing into Martin, and as it springs after him, he has a desperate, glimmering flash of an idea. There’s a brief moment of scrabbling, of Martin calling his name, and a bolt of terror at the abrupt certainty that it will target him instead. He doesn’t have time to check properly, though he’s vaguely aware of Martin staggering back along the wall, crashing into the drawers.

Jon lets himself fall, snatching out across the bedroom floor. He can hear it coming, its jagged limbs catching on the hostile air with a sound like tearing Velcro, and he can feel that dry-leaf movement against the backs of his legs.

He grasps, rolls around, and there’s a second where he can see exactly what it’s about to do – all those directions of jaw are wide, splaying out, around and through him, ready to close on another mouthful of what makes him who he is.

He holds the book open and out, and instead, it impacts with the pages, is swallowed into them. Jon slams it closed the second that he feels the breeze of its wake, heaves the bookend on top of it, though he’s not sure what that will achieve, given that it had got out before. Then he slumps, breathing hard.

“Jon?” Martin’s touch at his arm is light, more a reminder that they should go than an effort to pull him back up. “Are you okay? It didn’t…?” 

“I don’t think so,” Jon rasps. Not this time. He would know, he thinks, would have the same headache that he’d woken up with before, at least. Maybe he would have forgotten that they could leave, done the same to Martin, kept them trapped and terrified until it had digested years of them. 

He stands, using Martin’s arm for support, and then pushes himself away, going slowly towards the other room. It’s a bathroom, he realises, the man curled loosely around something he can’t make out, an aqua blue mat rucked underneath him. He doesn’t seem to notice them, but his face is mostly obscured by long, unbrushed hair.

“Hello?” Jon says, softly. “We’re here to help. We can get out, but we should hurry.”

At the sound of his voice, the man seems to freeze, for a second, and then slowly unfurls, straightening up a little. His eyes focus on Jon, slow and suspicious, and Jon tries to suppress a shiver at wondering how long he’d been here, at how much of him that thing might have eaten.

“Do you remember your name?” Martin asks, shuffling in behind Jon. The space clearly wasn’t meant for three, but he’s clearly chosen to ignore that. “I’m Martin, this is Jon. We’re from the Magnus Institute?”

“You…” the man hesitates, passing the word around his mouth, as if it’s been a long time since he’s used his tongue. “You want me to go outside?”

“Yes.” Jon does his best to muster a reassuring smile. “Once we get out, we can call someone to take care of the problem. Can you do that?”

“It’s not safe out there,” the man says, his face drawing into a frown, his one visible hand clenching into a fist.

“It’ll be safer than in here,” Martin tells him, gently, but still with an undercurrent of urgency. “We need to go, as quickly as we can.”

“No.” The man shakes his head, drawing himself straighter, and then hauling himself up against the edge of the bath. “No, there’s a _thing_ out there, you can’t – you’re one of them. You want everything else to get me.”

“No,” Jon starts to back away, trying to usher Martin out behind him. “No, that’s not–”

It all happens so fast. The man lunges at him, and there’s some kind of light in his other hand, bright and reflective, dazzling in the dull of the room. Martin yanks him back by his jacket, shoves him hard past him, towards the door. Jon falls against the edge of the door frame, hears Martin snapping something at their attacker, the sound of a soft impact, punctuated with a low grunt.

Martin grabs him again, pushes him properly out, and Jon goes. Martin’s out a second later, slamming the bathroom door behind him, gripping the handle like he thinks he’s going to have to wrestle over it.

“Leave it,” Jon snaps. “We have to get out before that thing comes back.”

Martin nods, and starts to descend ahead of him. His pace on the steps is uneven, to the point where Jon has to stay a metre behind to avoid walking into him. Every step, he glances back, for the man or for the monster, for anything, but the stairs above them stay empty – he can just make out, over the rapid thunder of his own heartbeat, the sound of the bathroom floorboards creaking.

By the time that they reach the last flight, Martin’s half-slithering down – Jon opens his mouth, ready to ask if he’s okay, but Martin’s legs go out from under him before he can, and he slides the rest of the way down into a heap on the hallway carpet. 

“Martin?” Jon has to put a foot on the base of the banister to step over him, scrambling down off the stairs. It’s an uncomfortable, lurching motion, matched only by what he’s feeling in his chest.

Martin blinks up at him like he had after opening the cupboard to the void in the kitchen, and Jon curses, softly, turning to look him over properly. Past him, there is a thick trail of dark red along the stairs where he’d fallen, smeared across each tread.

“Where are you hurt?” Jon asks, crouching, risking a glance over his shoulder. The silhouette is still waiting, just outside the front door, clear yet indistinct against the frosted glass. If he can get out, he can call an ambulance. Then come back in to try to drag Martin out – or maybe Martin shouldn’t be moved. “Martin?”

“Jon?” Martin pats at his arm, points unsteadily in the direction of _out_. “You should…”

“No.” The decision is abruptly, reflex-jerk easy. “No, I’m not leaving you.” He tries to sort back through what he’d seen, what had happened. The flash in the man’s hand must have been a knife – one of the ones from the empty block in the kitchen, what little he had been able to get together to try to defend himself against the horrors that plagued the house. Had gone into Martin just as easily.

Should’ve been him. If Martin hadn’t pulled him out of the way, it probably would have been. 

“What did you do that for?” Jon demands, the question harsh and spiked. He pats along Martin’s sides, searching for the injury, far more roughly than he means to – Martin hardly reacts, which cuts at him even worse. “Martin, you could have been–” _might still be_ , he knows, and the thoughts around it shudder. At the very least he’ll need stitches – and then he’s remembering the aftermath of Michael, when Martin had come to the hospital with him, refused to let him go before he’d been treated, had listened to all his lies with narrowed eyes. “What do you do _any of it_ for?”

Martin doesn’t seem to be hearing him. His hand comes up and settles against Jon’s shoulder – bloodied, smearing against his clothes – like it’s intended as some kind of reassurance. If it is, it doesn’t work – Jon can feel the pressure of it, is sure he’ll be able to for the rest of his life. Maybe it’s all they’ll ever be, Martin trying and Jon never quite able to meet him.

At least he’s not alone. Whatever Jon’s reasons for joining him had been, he doesn’t regret it. He thinks he knows them now, at least, knows what’s in that memory, even if he never lived it. _This_ is why, because he remembers sending Martin to follow up on Carlos Vittery, and his heart had spat out the possibility.

Jon shifts a little closer, trying to check if Martin’s still breathing, and Martin leans up to kiss him.


	10. Chapter 10

Martin clearly doesn’t intend for it to be anything more than the faintest of things. It’s soft – careful, as though Jon’s the one who’s been stabbed, rather than the other way around. Maybe it’s supposed to be an answer to his question, or a last chance to say something with no voice left.

Jon follows it down, as delicately as he can. Understands it, now, even if it’s just the last flutter of a wing in a spider’s web. For now, Martin is alive, and Jon can save him, and the whole of that surges in his chest like an ocean swell.

His own hand finds Martin’s cheek, rests there for a second – Martin seems to tense, as if he’s expecting to be pushed away, though there’s nowhere else for him to go, the floor beneath him unyielding. Jon wants to tell him that he could never, for all that it would be a demonstrable lie. Wants to tell him so much, with no idea how to say it. So he just doesn’t pull away.

From behind them, there’s a clatter and smash of door, and Jon starts, whirling around, clutching for a bookend that’s no longer there. He’s just in time to see it crash into the wall, a shape beyond that’s silhouetted, even against the misery of the weather beyond. Jon scrambles up, plants his feet between it and Martin, and sets his jaw. Maybe the description on the mirror had been wrong, or maybe the artefact has decided to make an exception for the Archivist, but either way, it will _not_ reach Martin.

“Boss?”

The word is sharp, laden with the same contempt that it always is, these days. Jon could weep at the sound of it, his shoulders slumping down first, and then the rest of him, back down onto the floor. He wipes a hand across his forehead, and knows that it leaves smears.

“Tim,” he says, watching him step across the threshold, so weary that his outline seems to haze for a moment. “Tim – Martin’s hurt.”

Tim doesn’t spare him a second glance, except to shove past him. He crosses the distance faster than Jon expects, so much so that Jon half wants to shoulder him away, suspicion coiling through his thoughts that he might somehow just be another trick of this place, a lie sent to settle him.

“Fuck _this_ ,” Tim says, softly, crouching to give Martin’s face a light tap. Goes on more loudly, already checking for the source of the blood. “Hey, Martin.”

“Tim?” Martin frowns up at him, as if he’s not in focus, and Jon takes a half-step back, swallowing, hating the feeling of spectating but with nothing in his throat to say. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been trying to call you all _day_.” Tim’s voice is lighter than it has been, like it had been before Prentiss – it’s forced, as far as Jon can tell, a slight desperate edge to it. Trying his best, for Martin.

Jon’s eyes follow the blood trail back up the stairs, and supposes, somewhere off-hand, that it really does look that bad. He shouldn’t have taken so long to notice. Not any of it. Martin shouldn’t have had to get _stabbed_ for him to realise.

“And if you’re going to be all aloof,” Tim goes on, oddly punctuated. “A guy has to put the effort in, you know?” He pulls Martin up into a drowsy mockery of a hug, pressing his hand over a point in his back. “There. I’m going to keep some pressure on that for you.”

“Okay,” Martin mumbles.

“Don’t just _stand there_ ,” Tim hisses, craning his neck around to glare at Jon, low, as if he thinks it might somehow evade Martin’s notice, even right next to his ear. “Call an ambulance!”

“Oh.” Jon nods, shakes his head, turns on his heel and tries to remember how to put one foot in front of the other. “Yes, I’ll do… yes.”

It’s like he’s moving through treacle. His limbs are lethargic, won’t be forced faster, and he would say that his world has been tipped into slow motion, except that Tim’s one-sided efforts at conversation with Martin still seem to be coming as quick as ever.

The figure is back. Not moving, this time – not Tim, and not Sasha. The one from the mirror. The silent, waiting thing that had tried to keep them trapped here.

Jon grits his teeth, reminds himself of what the artefact’s description had said. More than that, that Martin needs this. Then he reaches for the handle. It’s cold to the touch, the chill biting at his skin as if it were formed in a far deeper winter than London has reached in living memory, but he turns it anyway.

It swings inwards, and there’s nothing on the other side. Just a set of lock picks, sticking ostentatiously from the keyhole. Sasha had got them for Tim’s last birthday, Jon remembers, as some kind of joke, and he’d spend days learning how to use them.

He steps out onto the path beyond, cracked paving slabs with dandelions and grass blades forcing their way up between them, and catches sight of the figure again. It’s on the other side of the road, now, still facing him, still watching him. He wonders, as he pulls his phone out to dial, whether he’ll lose it, when he leaves. If it needs proximity to the artefact, or if it’ll still follow him. Perhaps it will travel with them, and he’ll sight it in the next carriage on the tube, in the flash of the streetlamps as the ambulance passes them, or if it will be gone until he’s still again.

The phone rings, and he turns to look back into the hall, close enough to nudge at the door with one foot to keep it open. He’s not willing to go any further away.

Tim is still holding Martin, talking to him, but Martin’s eyes search for Jon’s across the space between them – he looks worried, frowning with it, and while that should be entirely reasonable, given the situation he’s in, he’s focussed, completely and utterly, on Jon.

There’s a voice at the other end of the line. Jon answers its questions – gives the address that had been on Martin’s phone, requests the ambulance, but it feels dreamlike. The rest of him still watches Martin, wonders. It’s the kiss, he has to conclude. He’d felt like he’d been clear enough how he felt about it, but he’s hardly sufficiently well-versed in romance to be sure.

He meets Martin’s eyes again, sees the question in them – half an apology, that he doesn’t know what to do with. Wants to march back in to him and insist that it’s fine, that they’ll talk about it properly once he’s not bleeding out. That he’ll be better, that he’d better be, and then they’ll work it all out. He’ll hold on, until the emergency services arrive, and then a little bit further, and then Jon will sit with Tim on uncomfortable waiting room chairs until he can’t feel his legs anymore, and work out how to have the conversation. 

The rest of him knows that he should wait there, make sure that the paramedics know where to go.

Instead, he makes sure Martin’s looking, that he knows Jon has seen. Then he smiles, and hopes that tells him everything.


End file.
